Japan, U.K. Joining Forces to Make the World's Best Air-to-Air Missile

Japan and the United Kingdom are set to team up to create what would be the best air-to-air missile in the world, better than even the U.S. Air Force’s mighty AMRAAM. The missile is expected to become operational in the late 2020s, arming F-35 Joint Strike Fighters operated by both countries. It will be Japan’s first weapon developed with an ally other than the United States.

Japan and the U.K. are both major military powers with their own bleeding edge research and development programs. In recent years, Japan has developed the AAM-4B medium-range air-to-air missile. Created to replace Japan’s supply of older missiles, including the American-made AMRAAM, the AAM-4B was the first missile with an advanced electronically scanned array radar in the nose.

AESA radar fitted to France’s Rafale fighter.

The AAM-4B is an excellent missile that equips Japan’s F-2 and F-15J fighter jets. However, it’s also a large weapon that is carried externally on a fighter’s fuselage. Jets such as the F-35A, of which Japan has 42 on order, carry their weapons internally in bays to preserve their stealthy profiles. The AAM-4B is too large to fit inside the F-35A.

For its replacement, Japan is hard at work on a design using AESA radar. AESA radars are the new hotness, equipping aircraft such as the Eurofighter Typhoon, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and the Russian Sukhoi Su-57. AESA radars get rid of the traditional radar “dish” that swivels back and forth, substituting it for an array of solid state transmitter/receiver modules and advanced signal processors. While this might sound like a small detail, it has big implications for the battlefield.

These radars can effortlessly work across multiple frequencies simultaneously, which makes them not only better at finding objects but are also more difficult to detect. While traditional radars reveal their point of origin the same way the continuous beam of a flashlight reveals the holder in a pitch-black room, an AESA radar might only appear as a brief flash to a normal eye, also illuminating the target briefly in bands of light invisible to the naked eye, including ultraviolet, infrared, and others, collectively providing continuous illumination. Those same characteristics also make the radar highly resistant to enemy jamming.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the UK’s Meteor missile is the first air-to-air missile in the world to feature a ramjet engine. Meteor uses a normal solid fuel rocket booster to accelerate to speed, after which the missile’s titanium air intakes pop open and the ramjet takes over. The ramjet combusts the oxygen from the air rushing through its intakes to push the missile to “at least” Mach 4. Crucially and unlike traditional solid rocket fuel engines, it is also able to throttle the amount of fuel and oxygen it uses, allowing it to reserve energy for a last moment burst of speed if necessary. According to The National Interest, the missile’s range is “well in excess of” 65 miles.

As a result, the Meteor has a “no escape zone” (a zone of operation in which an aircraft cannot evade the missile using it’s own maneuverability) that is “at least three times” greater than the American AMRAAM missile. Meteor was also designed from the get-go to be carried internally in the F-35, and the UK has approximately 138 F-35Bs on order for the Royal Navy’s new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers.

Japan and the U.K. first began exploratory talks on a new missile in 2014. Japan’s self-imposed ban on developing new weapons with other nations had recently ended and the country was looking to partner with others to trade new technologies and lower development costs. Each realized the other could bring something unique to a new air-to-air missile, and each needed a new missile for the F-35. According to the Nikkei Asian Review, a formal announcement on co-development of the missile will be made in mid-December 2017, with a prototype assembled in 2018. Test flights should begin in 2023 and the missile should be ready for production in the late 2020s.

The result—an air-to-air missile with a Japanese AESA radar and a European ramjet engine—will be the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of missiles. The U.S. AMRAAM missile, originally fielded in the mid 1980s, has been progressively upgraded but is equipped with neither of the killer features found in the Anglo-Japanese missile. It is also “close to maxing out,” meaning future possible upgrades are incompatible with the basic missile design and a new design is needed. The U.S. is working on the new Long Range Engagement Weapon (LREW), but a timeline to an operational weapon is currently unknown.

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